As complex converged telecommunication networks designed to provide a wide range of services to customers become more prevalent, the need for integrating new services in a timely manner becomes increasingly important. Operations support systems (OSSs) in telecommunication systems have many different elements that require frequent updates and improvements when new services are introduced to customers. Such OSSs typically include order management, design and engineering, carrier interconnection, service provisioning, inventory, service activation, billing, customer care and service assurance subsystems. These subsystems are able to interact with each other and with various network elements and also must be able to accept input from and provide information to external elements, such as sales, engineering and technician personnel. Accordingly, such systems are complex and require careful configuration control.
OSSs are typically linked in a logical fashion to ensure that appropriate software interfaces exist between software modules in the systems and that the data transferred across those interfaces conforms to predefined standard formats. When a new service is introduced into the network, in many cases new functionality in the form of new hardware and new software must be added to various existing OSS components. However, especially when this functionality is provided by different vendors, the definition, development and deployment of such new services can significantly delay the introduction of those new services. This is because, in many cases, software code must be added to existing OSSs to support new functionality and/or interfaces to new systems. Additionally, extensive tests are typically required to verify that the data and functionality introduced for the new service conform to standard formats and that the operations of the new service conform to expectations. Such definition, development, deployment and testing are costly and time-intensive and, therefore, hinder the ability to rapidly introduce new services into a network.